IJII

Introduction

Two years ago, I reported (in an article published in issue one of Conversations) on the outrageous segregation imposed on Sephardi/Mizrahi students in the "Beit-Ya'acov" school in the city of Immanuel. To remind readers of the facts of this case, I provide this summary. On her first day of School, two years ago, Yael, a 10-year-old student at a Beit-Ya'acov Orthodox elementary school for girls, arrived at what had been her school for the past four years. Later that day she discovered that her classmates were all of Sephardi/Mizrahi extraction. She was told that she should have no contact whatsoever with any of her former Ashkenazi classmates. She realized that students had been physically separated within this school based solely on their ethnicity. The school was now virtually divided into two separate schools, with the Sephardi/Mizrahi students separated from the Ashkenazi [1] students, and the two groups housed in two isolated buildings - divided by a partition wall - with separate entrances, separate school-uniforms and different intermission timetables. The school's administration rationalized its actions by going so far as to stigmatize Mizrahi culture and individuals as suffering from "lower spiritual levels" that call for this separation as a means to protect Ashkenazi students from their potential bad influence. At the end of this first sad day of school, Yael realized that life, as she knew it, had forever changed.

Tmura - The Antidiscrimination Legal Center, headed by yours truly, has undertaken to voluntarily represent the families of the Sephardi/Mizrahi youngsters discriminated against by the school in their suit for compensation for the harm inflicted upon them by this segregation. Synchronically, the "Noar Kahakacha" NGO had decided to take the case to the Supreme Court of Israel. Even before allegedly winning the case in the Supreme Court, I have argued that this legal move might be ineffective in light of the politics of identity of the parties involved. Acknowledging that the target-population of any injunction to be granted by the court will be ultra-Orthodox Jews, one could definitely assume strong objection to any such coercive legal move. Accordingly, I have endorsed a more effective path, whereby a monetary price-tag be set for this kind of unacceptable behavior. Needing to pay a high price for discriminatory practices, I believe, would motivate any party - as a matter of deterrence - to refrain from such behavior.

The Immanuel case is representing only one out of hundreds of Sephardi/Mizrahi pupils subjected to discriminatory practices of separation, humiliation and exclusion. It sheds light on the shocking facts regarding segregation in education within Jewish communities in Israel. This article calls, yet again, attention to this segregation, and proposes to reevaluate the current situation in light of recent court decision. In the first part of this article, I shall examine the strengths and weaknesses of the Supreme Court's decision in this case, and try to walk the reader through the oddities of the endless proceedings taken to enforce it. Using the yardstick of the famous American Brown case forbidding segregation against African-Americans, I shall scrutinize its Israeli counterpart. In the second part of this article, I shall draw on the concept of intersecting identities to introduce the identity components of the girls I represent, and then discuss the way this intersectionality shapes our modes of representation, rendering the protection of the girls' fundamental right to equality highly difficult to attain.

Part 1: From Brown to "Noar Kahakacha": Finally, Our Own Brown!(?)

The shunning treatment of the Sephardi/Mizrahi students in Immanuel recalls the historical treatment of African-American students in the US. In 1954, the US Supreme Court declared such segregation unconstitutional in the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education. In 2009, a seemingly similar decision was taken by the Israeli Supreme Court regarding the "Beit-Yaacov" case in Noar Kahakacha v. Ministry of Education. Finally, our own Brown! Or is it?

The similarities between Brown and Noar are ostensible, making the comparison between the two cases almost inevitable. And indeed, Israeli media as well as academia celebrated the Noar case as the "Israeli Brown". Notwithstanding this flattering comparison, however, a closer look into the morphology of the two cases reveals what could be identified as irreconcilable differences between them. These differences are of great significance, and not just for a comprehensive intellectual analysis of both cases. Rather, I stress that it had a tremendous effect on the effectiveness of the Israeli Supreme Court's decision and the way it has been perceived as illegitimate by the Hareidi population as well as the secular.

Prior to introducing these differences, I should take this opportunity to describe the chaotic manner in which the Immanuel case has unfolded.

Shortly after granting its final decision, the Supreme Court was confronted with recurring motions for "Contempt of the Court" filed by the plaintiff, due to the defendants' disobedience. Though required by the Supreme Court's final verdict to abolish any discriminatory elements from their school, the "Beit-Yaacov" administration has done only little to comply with the Court's orders. Within this non- compliant environment, the court has repeatedly issued writs to enforce its ruling, all to be ignored by the school. Furthermore, Ashkenazi parents have simply arranged for their daughters to study elsewhere. After the court forbade this transferring of pupils, Ashkenazi parents have refrained completely from sending their daughters to school, while instead teaching the girls in secretive private and independent hiding places. At this point, the parents of the Ashkenazi students were personally prosecuted by the court, based on their legal duty to send their daughters to an officially recognized school. After this order was also disobeyed, incarceration writs were issued against the parents. Consequently, they were all sent to jail for contempt of the court, to which they proudly went, stating that they will always prefer an allegedly "spiritual-religious-moral" ethic to a secular court command.

This legal fiasco has been accompanied by strong support from the ultra-Orthodox community nation-wide, with massive demonstrations in favor of the parents and their "Kidush Hashem" resistance. Images of the Holocaust were irresponsibly bannered, while Israeli media held its breath for a whole day - the day in which busses, packed with Hareidi fathers, made its way proudly to jail. The whole event has turned into a religion-state debate as to whether the Supreme Court should or shouldn't have the ultimate authority to decide on religious matters. The discourse was shifted into a political rather than a social one: it was not about the hatred and discrimination from which the Sephardi/Mizrahi population suffers in Hareidi communities, but rather on the Hareidi community's religious rights. At the margins of this completely distorted "reality," some other voices were heard: Horrifying stories of brutal and systematic discrimination against Sephardim/Mizrahim in Hareidi communities have emerged, however anonymously. Interestingly enough, the Hareidi community spokespersons started making counterarguments against secular Israeli society, as entertaining no-less discriminatory practices.[2] Shamefully, few voices of condemnation have been raised against the Hareidi quest for actually recognizing its right to racism. No public official has defended the court or its authority. The Sephardi/Mizrahi students were simply outside of the scope of public interest. In the silence provided by the Israeli secular public, the Hareidi cry, however embarrassingly dishonest, has dictated the public agenda.

How has it come to the point where legal rights and moral standards have been shattered in the face of hypocrisy? Why hasn't this case turned into the Brown case, where regardless of strong objections to the Court's ruling, this ruling still resonated in every school as relating to the right for equality? Why has it not enjoyed presidential support as its American counterpart?

My contention is that among possible differences between the cases, which may have had an impact on their ramifications, most important is the fact that Brown and Noar reflect different types of discrimination, entailing different ramifications. Yes, both cases dealt with groups that were discriminated against on the basis of their origin (be it racial for Brown or ethnic for Noar). This discrimination, nevertheless, carries some important differences, which separate the cases from one another, thereby determining their different repercussion.

While Brown's African-American victims were easily recognized as a distinctive group suffering from discrimination, in Noar, the Sephardi/Mizrahi victims lacked such clear recognition. Though lingering for over six decades now, discrimination against Sephardim/ Mizrahim in Israel is still covert and - to a substantial extent - denied. Accordingly, the discrimination narrative the Noar case provided was very partial and carries only limited potential for future application in struggles for eliminating discriminatory practices in Israel. Though carrying a strong anti-discrimination sentiment, the case refrains from providing any overarching recognition of Sephardim/Mizrahim as a discriminated social category. Instead, it virtually incorporates the "separate but equal" line of thought into the heart of its leading opinion.[3] Brown, on the other hand, carried a converse trait. Though criticized for many just reasons, Brown, nevertheless, strongly signified the recognition of White America in its overarching discriminatory practices, and implied a genuine dedication to break from it. Generally speaking, Brown can be read as a typical anti-discrimination case aiming to protect a group suffering from "classic" de-jure discrimination within a clear racial sociological dialectic of "difference". Noar, on the other hand, should be read as raising difficulties typical to a group suffering from de-facto discrimination, within a "sameness" social atmosphere.

African-Americans as a De-jure Discriminated Group; Sephardim/Mizrahim as De-Facto Discriminated Group

African-Americans are the most prominent group to have suffered from de jure discrimination in the USA. Both slavery and the Jim Crow laws were aimed at African-Americans, creating a state-sponsored, constitutionally-protected system of racial discrimination that took place after the abolition of slavery through the mid-twentieth century.[4]

The Sepharim/Mizrahim, on the other hand, are a legally unrecognized group. Despite being subjected to lingering de facto discrimination, they are largely absent from the Israeli anti-discrimination discourse. Vis-à-vis Israeli Arabs, for example, Sephardim/Mizrahim's unrecognized socio-legal status is particularly invisible. The legal system reveals no traces of acknowledging Sephardim/Mizrahim, in either its discrimination or anti-discrimination discourse [5] , as a Mizrahi scholar once observed:[6]

"What were the legal manifestations of the status of Mizrahi Jews? The issue is much more subtle than that of the status of Israeli Arabs or women. In the case of Arabs and women, explicit legal norms discriminated or at least recognized differences. With regard to the Mizrahim, Israeli law appears to have been blind. Formally they have been treated as equal..."

African-Americans as Ultimate Excluded "Others"; Sephardim/Mizrahim as Included "Sames"

Using legislation to discriminate provokes a sharper sense of humiliation, of otherness, and of alienated outsiderness.[7] In this framework, discrimination constituted African-Americans as an unmistakable "minority" group. De-jure discrimination against African-Americans created a clear "we-they" political structure, which encouraged the development of a group consciousness among its own members and vis-à-vis the white group, as "others."[8]

For Sephardim/Mizrahim, an utterly different experience prevails. Israeli legal system has, formally, adopted the "melting pot" ideology that promoted a Zionist-Jewish ethos of one land for all Jews. This mechanism proposed a unifying, sameness-based, "all-Jew encompassing" de-jure rhetoric. Exemplary of this is the Israeli Law of Return of 1950, [9] declaring the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel, supplemented by a provision in the Nationality Law of 1952 that grants automatic Israeli citizenship to every immigrant Jew. [10]

The Arab-Jewish dialectic under which Sephardim/Mizrahim are considered "sames" is further nourished by their socially-perceived identity, as being, in a way, both Jewish (by virtue of their religion) and Arab (by virtue of their Arab Diaspora cultural-geographic origin).[11]

It is, therefore, sameness rather than difference, which deprives Sephardim/Mizrahim of their right to receive antidiscrimination relief.[12]

Summary of First Part

The differences in the patterns of discrimination from which Sepharidm/Mizrahim suffer dictated the way in which the Immanuel case ruling was perceived by Israeli society. This legal battle has taken place in a socio-legal atmosphere where no recognition existed of the need of Sephardim/Mizrahim to be protected under antidiscrimination laws.

After introducing the more conceptual dimension of this case, I would now like to move to this article's second part and more practical dimension, whereby some light will be shed on the complexities of representing such a case as lawyers. Our primary challenges as the lawyers representing the Sephardi/Mizrahi families extended beyond conceptual concerns to the more practical aspects of representing religious plaintiffs within a secular legal system .[13]

Introducing triadic intersecting identities: Religious ethnic women in Israel

Normally, a victim of discrimination is discriminated against due to one of her identity traits: It might be for her ethnicity, her gender, her sexual-orientation, etc. In some cases, however, there can be an intersection of identities that triggers it. This phenomenon is known in professional literature as "Intersecting Identities", a situation in which a person is more susceptible to discrimination due to increased vulnerabilities. Moreover, intersecting identities create a whole larger than the sum of its parts, i.e., she is more susceptible to discrimination in a manner that is greater and different from that of two other women carrying separately her identity traits.[14]

The young pupils in the Immanuel case are a perfect illustration of such unique vulnerability. They are discriminated against for many combined reasons that are all identity-based: 1) They are discriminated as women in the patriarchal Israeli society, 2) Discriminated as Arab-Jews within the Eurocentric Israeli public space and religious elitism, and 3) Discriminated as women living under the patriarchic order of Jewish religion.

1) Ethnicity - Though almost not recognized by Israeli society, ethnic discrimination has been a continual struggle for Sephardim/Mizrahim in Israeli society since the establishment of the State of Israel. Upon arrival from their countries of origin, Sephardic Jews were categorized as "Mizrahim," [15] a social and cultural category that was invented just for them at that time.[16] However, though established in the past, this category is still meaningful sixty years later. Mizrahim in Israel continue to suffer from structural injustices. Statistics prove they have a high unemployment rate, comprise a disproportionate percentage of Israel's prison and social welfare populations, and suffer substantial underachievement in education. These deficiencies have held steady or even increased over Israel's six decades of statehood.[17] Mizrahi ethnicity, within Jewish religious communities, however, bares yet another layer of inferiority, as they are held to be of a lower spiritual religious level, allegedly, due to limited religious commitment.

2) Gender within religion: The dialectical relationships between the advancement of human rights and the preservation of religious culture exist profoundly in our world, and Judaism is no exception. Religious women in Israel suffer from various discriminatory patriarchic practices administered mainly by the Orthodox Jewish caste. Though prevalent in secular society as well, the discrimination against women in religious circles deepens their inferior position by virtue of being additional, and to an extent, unique. Among other things, ultra-Orthodox women are separated from men in their synagogues, banned from serving as community leaders, banned from singing in front of men, and recently, required to use the rear seats of public transportation alone, in isolation from men. In our case, the religion/gender dyad had further direct impact: Unlike Sephardi/Mizrahi male-youth, for whom a relatively sustainable Sephardi/Mizrahi school system has been created, the female-youth, whose need in education is only moderately acknowledged within ultra-Orthodox Judaism, were left with no such equivalent available alternative.

Created and nurtured within a context of intersecting identities, the discrimination from which these pupils suffer called for nontraditional practices of advocacy in strategizing the legal battle against their discrimination.

Main Difficulties in Using the Legal System

Trying the case through the "private law" mechanism brought into effect the triadic intersectionality of identity of our clients. They were no longer merely remote objects of a fight for equality, but rather functioned as active players: plaintiffs seeking direct redress.

1) The Sephardi/Mizrahi identity - hidden intersectionality: The main problem in combating this discrimination is that it is largely denied and consequently, the fight against it is de-legitimized. As I have elaborated in the first part of this article, this denial burdens the plaintiffs with extra burden of proof of their discrimination. In this case specifically, the "Beit-Ya'acov" school insisted that the students' segregation was religious-based rather than ethnicity-based, even though no authority could be brought in by the school to support this alleged halakhic demand. Adopting a religious guise for what is clearly an ethnicity-based discrimination became possible, partly, due to this ethos of denial.

This first barrier is followed by additional barriers imposed by the unique triadic intersecting identities our plaintiffs bear.

2) Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and the legal system: The ultra-Orthodox community is usually an extremely closed society, keeping its affairs out of reach of Israel's state courts, especially affairs relating to its "inner politics", like discrimination against minorities. This was the main reason that Sephardi/Mizrahi rabbis repeatedly rejected our efforts to persuade them to take this issue to the court. Our failure to do so stemmed from the contention of this community, that Israel's courts are illegitimate agents of a secular system.

One of the most fundamental questions of law is the matter of iuris dictia, namely the right of tribunals to adjudicate a case. Jewish law, like other legal systems, sets a few basic rules in order to answer this question, considering the identity of the person to whom legal conflicts should be addressed.

The Torah states: "Now these are the ordinances which thou shalt set before them" [18] . The Talmud interpreted this to mean "before them" and not before non-Jews or laymen [19] . In other words, the Talmud concludes that legal conflicts should be settled by no one other than a Jewish rabbinical judge. Moreover, the prohibition includes non-ordained Jewish rabbinical wise men who are still considered laymen .[20]

The rationale is quite simple, and derives from the basic religious belief in God [21]. One who weaves his life with Jewish beliefs, should resolve his legal issues facing an ordained rabbinical expert, applying Jewish law [22] . Furthermore, as a matter of Jurisprudence, law has been known to change in different times and cultures, while the Divine law remains eternal .[23]

An exception to this norm is known as "Syrian Tribunals". This noncontroversial exception makes it possible to digress from the basic norm under special circumstances e.g where there are no Jewish rabbinical wise men to be found in the vicinity, or where the majority of a given community accepts the authority of the local judges . [24] Nonetheless, under these circumstances, a tribunal is valid under Jewish law only as a temporary solution. [25] Some Orthodox community members consider themselves exempted from the rabbinical authority. . . [26] [27]

Regardless of this inherent complication, when it comes to financial matters, tried through tort litigation, it is even more crystal clear that it should be exclusively addressed by the rabbinical system, where Jewish law alone applies. Rabbinical authorities, therefore, zealously defend the prohibition in this field [28] , which is reinforced even by secular academic support. [29] In effect, many religious Jews address their legal matter to private tribunals, where non-ordained judges rule under Jewish law. Recent statistical reports in Israel indicate that this movement is constantly growing.[30]

Notwithstanding these difficulties, however, in this case, we have, for the first time, been able to persuade two families (out of the potential 80 families subjugated to this discrimination) to take this very disturbing issue to a secular court due to its severe circumstances, and due to its only quasi-financial nature. Their community's immediate response was, needless to say, complete alienation.

It is indeed rare for families of the community to take this issue before a secular court, turning this opportunity for an action into rare and precious one, where our representation strategies had to be carefully planned.

Representation strategies

Outside the court:

The triadic intersectionality of our clients' identity has had tremendous impact on our mode of representation. Feminist Sephardi/Mizrahi cause lawyers as we are, we knew that our own intersecting identities would affect our legal work, especially as cause lawyers.

Outside the court

1) Femininity and religion: our feminine identity as lawyers had posed a difficulty to our clients, who found it impossible to communicate with us solely and directly, due to the religious ban on "Yihud", namely staying in solitary with a woman other than one's wife. Given the fact that the fathers functioned as the family's proxies, as traditionally accustomed in these families, this became a real barrier for our lawyer-client relations. This ban, however, yielded eventually an interesting solution. Upon our refusal to assign one of our male lawyers to the case, as the clients suggested, the families began communicating with us via both parents. This move has turned the women-mothers into active actors outside the domestic sphere to which they were limited prior to our encounter.

2) Communality and religion: We, on the other hand, had to ease our community organizer's functions, to which we normally adhere, as cause lawyers. Under other circumstances, we would have initiated political actions designed to induce "internal" pressure on the relevant community to change its discriminatory behavior, such as holding a demonstration in front of the school or bringing alternative volunteer teachers to teach a class on the right for equality. In this case, however, it was our understanding that communal actions of this kind might turn devastating for our clients. Living in a closed ultra-Orthodox community, any such invasion of secular, feminist forces would have been perceived by their community as a betrayal of its most essential values. It was for this reason that we decided to orchestrate the demonstration outside our clients' residential area and to settle for a more distanced and to an extent, more detached, legal battle.

Inside the court

The court itself also required our mediating functions to be able to fully contextualize and comprehend the plaintiffs.

1) Legal rivalry and religion: Bound by the idea of direct rivalry embodied in tort law litigation, our clients had to openly confront the people who wronged them. Furthermore, as accustomed in the courtroom, the families, as plaintiffs, had to take the stand. These seemingly procedural exposures, however, had turned into a living nightmare for our clients. Even at the early stages of the proceedings, our clients refused to appear in any of the court sessions that they were not compelled to, let alone to bring their daughters there. We, on the other hand, had to recurrently remind the court that these are not manifestations of inadvertence to the case, but rather a matter of context. Our clients have been subjected to immense pressure from across the whole spectrum of the ultra-Orthodox community. They've been branded as "traitors", "secular", and even "feminist"... They lost their jobs, their friends and neighbors' support and their daughters had to leave for schools outside their city.

2) Court fees and poverty: During earlier stages, further intersectionality-based difficulties surfaced. While being a Mizrahi in Israel often implies being poor, being a Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox magnifies this risk even more. Our clients, families consisting of 9 and 11 individuals, live in severe financial need and dependence. This financial shortage functions as yet another barrier they needed to overcome on their path for justice, as the court fees in Israel amount to a substantial sum of money. To enable their pursuit for justice, therefore, these families were asked by the state to prove their poor position, a process that lingers for months and requires financial resources to execute. Families who live from hand to mouth were asked to provide bank statements for accounts they never had the privilege of holding. Notwithstanding these objective impossibilities, the court refused to apply other, more contextual grounds of evaluation on our clients' cases. Wishing to avoid further delays and embarrassments for our clients, we have asked people interested in this pursuit for justice to donate money to cover the court expenses, thereby connecting the families with individuals with whom they would have probably never agreed being associated with.

Epilogue

Yael's story is not hers alone; it is not even the story of her 180 classmates; it is rather the story of many Sephardi/Mizrahi pupils in Israel today. Discriminatory practices against them within the educational system are not limited to the ultra-Orthodox community. Similar practices have even been found at some of the top schools in the state secular school system, where such discriminatory practices are extremely hard to trace and combat effectively, since from a legal perspective, it is of course easier to fight against the more blatant and traceable ones. Our role as Sephardi/Mizrahi cause lawyers is to abolish such discriminatory practices everywhere. Ironically, in the secular realm, where the discrimination is harder to prove, we're less burdened with intersectionality than in the Orthodox community, where discrimination is easier to spot, but harder to fight. This impossible situation provides us with yet another virtue of intersectionality-based analysis: it provides us the tools to illuminate socially constructed realities that translate into legal implausibility.

After the Beit Yaacov administration met with the petitioners, both sides decided that they will continue

negotiating the case outside the court. The parents were thereafter released from incarceration, and

the Court ordered the parties that a detailed settlement be submitted to him by the end of Aug. Living the

stage open for the parties' agreement, no outlines or preconditions were set in advance to ensure

the anti-discriminatory nature of such future agreement. Furthermore, the Beit Yaacov administration itself

never recognized its discriminatory practice neither has it provided any guarantee to eliminate similar

practices of that kind in any of its other schools.

As of today, Tmura and Achoti have decided to monitor the agreement upon its submission, by

calling public attention to its due date.

[1] "Ashkenazi" is a term describing Jews of European descent who until today form the majority of Israel's established hegemony.

[2] The most problematic of these allegations was the fact that Justice Edmond Levi, who presided the case and lead the motions for contempt proceedings, was himself the only Mizrahi judge out of 15 Supreme Court Justices. This allegation - which rightfully went down to the bottom of secular society's own discriminatory nature - has been cynically used by these people to justify their own discriminatory practices.

[3]Only in one of the concurring opinions, can one identify rejection of this ideology, allowing a more broadly conceived anti-discrimination policy into the ruling. This relatively minor portion of the ruling will be later discussed in details.

[4]To make the point clearer, one can distinguish the experience of African-Americans from that of Mexican-Americans, for example, who have not explicitly fallen under any of America's de jure discriminatory regulations. Mexican-Americans' suffering from discriminatory practices such as chronic abuse and segregation stemmed from reality rather than from official legal stipulations.

[5]In another paper I wrote, I have set a discrimination typology that can shed some light on the process shaping this phenomenon, namely the use of de facto discrimination alone to discriminate against a group in a legal system whereby discrimination is synchronically administered by de jure venues. See Wishing for Discrimination? A Comparative Gaze on Categorization, Racism and the Law, 2 Sortuz: Onati Journal of Emergent Socio-Legal Studies 39 (2008).

[6]Lahav, supra note 148, id.

[7]See Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights 88-89 (1991).

[8]Here this Article adopts Habermasian terms. Jurgen Habermas, Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition 107, 121-122 (Charles Taylor et al., 1994).

[9] 4 L.S.I 114. This law is known as the law of "Shevut".

[10] 6 L.S.I.50. In addition, Israel's Declaration of Independence declares Israel to be the home of all Jews: "In the state of Israel the Jewish people have raised".

[11]Studies in identity perception reveal an interesting dissonance through which Mizrahis identify more with being a part of the Jewish people than with being Israeli citizens, whereas Ashkenazis identify themselves primarily as Israeli citizens. Schulz, supra note 53, at 253-56. One shocking datum indicates that Israeli Arabs are more likely to identify as Israelis than Mizrahim.

[12] I adhere to antidiscrimination laws as the best available legal tool to combat discrimination given the inherent limitations of the law as a means to achieving social, and more particularly, racial justice. See see generally, Robert M. Cover, The Supreme Court, 1982 Term - Foreword: Nomos and Narative, 97 HARV. L. REV. 4 (1983); Violence and the Word, 95 YALE L.J. 1601 (1986).

[13]Before embarking on this part, I wish to remind the reader that Tmura represents only two out of tens of families that were willing to file a suit for compensation against the discriminating parties: The "Beit-Ya'acov" chain of schools and the Ministry of Education. The claim is for a monetary compensation of the families for the injury that has befallen them due to the discrimination they've suffered.

[14]Kimberle W. Crenshaw, Race, Reform and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331 (1988); Kimberle W. Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,43 Stanford Law Review 1241 (1991).

[15] Mizrahi, meaning ‘eastern' in Hebrew, is a term used in Israel to describe Jews whose origins are from Arab and Muslim Countries.

[16]See Oren Yiftachel, Nation-Building or Ethnic Fragmentation? Ashkenazim, Mizrahim and Arabs in the Israeli Frontier, 1 Space and Polity 2, 149-169 (1997); Hubert Lu-Yon and Rachel Kalush: Housing in Israel: Policy and Inequality (1994).

[17]Although Mizrahim today comprise a larger share of formally educated society, recent research indicates that the gap itself between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim in education has grown in the last decades. See Momi Dahan, He is (Not) Entitled - Has the Gap in Education Narrowed? in Education and Social Justice in Israel - On Equal Opportunities in Education 19 (Samuel Shay et al, 2003).

[18]Exodus 21, 1.    

[19] Gittin 82b

[20] ibid.

[21] Tanhuma, Mishpatim

[22]Yevamot 109b

[23] Derashot HaRan, no. 11

[24] H.M. 8:1

[25} Shakh's comments, ibid.

[26] Menahem Alon, HaMishpat HaIvri, p. 21; and Yaacov Bezek, Tehumin 1

[27] Rabbi Eli Katz, Tehumin 2

[28] R. Ovadiah Yosef, Yehave Daat, 4:65

[29] Eliav Shohetman, Tehumin 13, p. 337

[30] Adam Hefri-Vinogradov, to appear in Iyunei Mishpat, vol. 34 (1) 2011.

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